Sessions at Strata 2012 about Big Data and Weather on Thursday 1st March

One doesn’t normally think about Big Data when the rain falls, but we’ve been measuring and analyzing Big Weather for years. Due to recent advancements in Big Data, cloud computing, and network maturity it’s now possible to work with extremely large weather-related data sets.

The Climate Corporation combines Big Data, climatology and agronomics to protect the $3 trillion global agriculture industry with automated full-season weather insurance. Every day, The Climate Corporation utilizes 2.5 million daily weather measurements, 150 billion soil observations, and 10 trillion scenario data points to build and price their products. At any given time, more than 50 terabytes of data is stored in their systems, the equivalent of 100,000 full-length movies or 10,000,000 music tracks. All of this is meant to provide the intelligence and analysis necessary to reduce the risk of adverse weather on U.S. farmers, which is the cause of more than 90% of crop loss.

The Climate Corporation’s generation system uses thousands of servers to periodically process decades of historical data and generate 10,000 weather scenarios at each location and measurement, going out several years. This results in over 10 trillion scenario data points (e.g. an expected rainfall value at a specific place and time in the future), for use in an insurance premium pricing and risk analysis system amounting to over fifty terabytes of data in our live systems at any given time. Weather-related data is ingested multiple times a day directly from major climate models and incorporated into The Climate Corporation’s system. Under the hood, the The Climate Corporation’s Web site is running complex algorithms against a huge dataset in real-time, returning a premium price within seconds. The size of this data set has grown an average of 10x every year as the company adds more granular geographic data. Hear The Climate Corporation CEO David Friedberg discuss how to apply big data principles to the real-world challenge of protecting people and businesses from the financial impact of adverse weather.